Post-Civil War lawmen tough on criminals

That law enforcement authorities in the Valley were tougher on criminals 100 years ago than upriver lawmen were would be an understatement.

In fact, history has painted a grim picture about the time of the outbreaks of the modern Mexican Revolution.

Newspapers on both sides of the border carried accounts of raids, killings and all sorts of other criminal violence in 1913 that were as common as during the immediate post-Civil War years.

A prominent attorney and author, Frank Cushman Pierce, devoted considerable space in his 1917 book, “Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley,” to legal executions as well as lynchings and executions without due process.

Some of these accounts drew attention from newspapers in Texas, where governing authorities often found it hard to get used to the idea that the Confederate States of America had lost the war to the Union Army, led by General U.S. Grant.

Pierce wrote that there were too many rebel gringos on both sides of the Lower Rio Grande (Brownsville and Matamoros-Reynosa) who refused to be part of the Reconstruction program for the war-torn South.

These die-hard individuals had to deal with another difficult problem —Mexicans who sympathized and cooperated with the Union authorities during the Civil War.

Pierce described one such incident that outraged many and pleased twice as many in 1867.

“Three Mexicans were tried in the district court of Cameron County in Brownsville, for the crime of having murdered a family of Mexicans not far north from Brownsville,” Pierce wrote.

“They were convicted and in late October of that year were hung on a scaffold erected in the Fort Brown reservation not far from the jail and directly in front of what is known as the gymnasium.”

The Pierce narrative explained what was common then and now.

Authorities were afraid that friends or relatives of the accused would try to rescue the defendants.

Therefore, “as a precaution,” the lynching took place in the military garrison.

A year earlier, in 1866, a Yankee solider in Brownsville got into an argument with a campsite doctor and stabbed the medic to death.

The military arrested, tried and convicted the trooper. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

The Fort Brown jail been destroyed by fire during the war, forcing the military to use a downtown two-story building as a jailhouse.

The judge fixed the date for the hanging, but was delayed pending the arrival of the convict’s parents for a visit prior to the execution.

The residents, according to the author’s account, were outraged to learn that the convict had escaped, tunneling his way from the jail under a street to another block and onto to a small wooden kitchen, and then 70 feet to the next street.

The Pierce narrative explained the soldier’s absence from jail had been discovered by the officer of the day, a Lt. John Mansur, and within hours Mansur recaptured the escapee.

The next day the man was hanged from the same gallows used to execute the three Mexicans the year before.